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This site was developed by educators working with the National Archives. It is an incredible site where you can design your own interactive activity with primary sources. There are seven kinds of activities you can build based on the type of learning you want student to achieve: finding a sequence, focusing on details, making connections, mapping history, seeing the big picture, weighing the evidence, and interpreting data. There are also a lot of really insightful pre-made activities that would work with many different grade levels. This site is just extraordinary! I plan to start using it right away!

This is a wonderful site to help "bring history to life". I love how there are thumb nail images of each photo/drawing and written documents to give you a quick preview. My favorite feature is the interactive activities. This is something worth using with students and sharing with all staff!

Site includes maps, pictures, thematic packets for teachers and more. Teachers are able to navagate throughout the site to access all aspects of history. Site also provides sources for professional training and outside resources. Site provides training on how to use primary sources.

Library of Congress Teachers Page, with links to using primary sources, etc. The LOC has created "Themed Resources" that include specific, common topics into easy to use sets. The combined resources include grouped primary source sets, lessson plans, exhibitions, etc. Love IT! Also provides user with pre-made LOC professional development sessions called "Teaching with Primary Sources."

This fascinating site is filled with information about spies during the America Revolution. Users can explore the letters of spies (both in their original format and a transcribed version) and their stories and techniques. In addition, the site offers a timeline, more information about people of the revolution, and a teacher's lounge with activities and suggestions for using primary sources with all students.

This site offers teachers and students access to archival photos, documents, letters, video segments, maps, and a timeline that starts in the early 1500's

I like the chronological organization of this website and the way authors have embedded primary sources into the text about Nebraska. I also appreciate they way the timeline focuses on "Nebraska Events and Themes" but also includes "National" and "International" events. With each event the site offers Teacher Activities with lesson plans, tools, and media to share with students.

This site has everything Nebraska. Click on the Nebraska Time line and you are taken to a more detailed timeline for that period. Then click on an event and you are taken to a page with specific resources and information. There are also lesson plans to download for grades 4, 8, and 12. It is pretty easy to navigate this site.

This site offers readers a chance to hear the voices of people the history textbooks have traditionally left out. Interviews done in the 1930's with former slaves are transcribed on this site, some with photographs of the former slave included. The transcripts are difficult to read because of dialect, racial slurs, and some troubling content. With teacher assistance, though, I think these transcripts could help students better understand life for slaves in our country's history.

This site provides first-person accounts from former slaves. I have actually used this site in American Literature to show students what slaves went through. It gives them a voice and students have really connected with the slaves' stories. Students can find lots of material about slavery, but the first-person accounts make it much more personal.

This website for kids is develped by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It is an award winning website with the character Energy Ant. Learn all about energy, its sources, uses, how to save energy, history with information rich timeline, calculators and tools for converting energy, measuring etc., games and activities, glossary and teacher section. Text formatted.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration provides this "Energy Kids" site. It defines energy in lots of different ways. It compares renewable and nonrenewable sources as well as potential and kinetic energy. It talks about different types of energy sources, the history of energy and even provides games and activities for kids.

This website, created by the US Dept of Energy's Information Administration, answers students' questions about energy -- from what is energy to the history of energy to saving energy. Website provides teachers with lesson plans, teacher guides, virtual field trips, energy career information. All teacher information is categorized by student age group.

The National Archives does a great job of creating lesson plans to use with primary documents. This would be a great resource to guide teachers through the process of integrating primary documents that go along with their curriculum objectives. The website is easy to navigate so you can quickly access the information that is needed.

NOAA has primary resource collections on the Gulf oil spill, hurricanes, El Nino, tides and sea turtles. I really like the way they feature current topics of importance in the news right now. This would be a great way to teach media literacy to our students. They also have a feature activity section called "Data in the Classroom" where students can make real world connections with real data related to El Nino, sea level, and water quality.

This site is an excellent weather website with resource collections divided into the following areas: ocean and coasts, climate, weather and atmosphere, marine life (sea turtles), freshwater (water cycle), and special topics. There data visualizations for weather events, lots of maps and charts for middle/high school students to analyze weather events, water cycle lessons, and a section with activities for teachers to bring real world data into the classroom.

The map lover in me is enthralled with this website. The site contains detailed historical maps organized by themes like "Environmental History" and "The Historical Geography of Transportation". Each map then has links to lesson plans organized by K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 with links to additional, applicable primary sources. The site also includes helpful tips for teachers and a useful glossary.

This is a great site for upper elementary through high school. There are numerous learning experiences from exploring a town which has been cleaned up, to learning to help the city budget enough to follow through with their plans of cleaning up the environment. There are activity areas as well as teacher information sections. I will be sharing this with the middle school science teachers I know.

This is a site with a terrific game about the travels of Lewis and Clark. When moving through each state, one must play a game to continue traveling. Not only is it fun, but there is a wealth of information given along the way. I will share this with the 4th grade teachers in my school.

An incredible number of primary sources can be found on this site regarding our first president. I was impressed with the "Educational Resources" that take some primary sources and scaffold teachers' use of them with students in grades 3-5 and middle/high school.

A fantastic site that has interactive videos and a written history of the Apollo missions. This site could be used in science with the study of rockets, planets, the moon, etc. It could also be used during History class with the study of the cold war and the space race.

This seems to be a good site for U.S. history. It separates lessons by ERA. It incluseds worksheets for each ERA as well as documents which are related to the ERA. There are pictures from each of the ERAS and various teaching activities. I would use this site for the 9-12 grade student with the possibility of use with middle school students.

This site contains a wealth of resources for teachers. They have primary source sets that include teacher resource booklets and lesson plans. One of the sets I found useful was one on the Constitution that included newspaper articles and original documents that trace the drafting and adoption of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This set would be useful for all grade levels for Constitution day materials in September. There was also an interesting primary source set on Thanksgiving that had paintings and photographs showing historical perspectives on American Thanksgiving traditions.

While the Library of Congress website is vast, I found the Classroom Resources section under the Teachers heading to be beneficial for my current position as a third grade classroom teacher; although many of the items I saw could be used at any elementary grade level. I found the Primary Sources by State and Immigration Challenges to be beneficial to my current unit in my district's SS program. The Thanksgiving link would be interesting for the students to see and discover things they didn't know before celebrating this holiday. I'll definitely use this site with my students, because it goes so well with what we're studying. Plus, it creates a more 'real' experience than their textbook allows.

This site uses primary images along with videos about topics like the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. Having videos of individual's remembering these specific historical events related to Nebraska history from would be a powerful resource for students. This would be a great resource to use along with other primary documents.

This website has primary sources and government documents on it. It is another portal site with a section devoted just to kids with links to government information, websites of government agencies for kids, a NASA page, and the health pyramid. It also has primary documents on the census dating back to 1790 which I thought was pretty neat.

NASA.gov For Educators. NASA.gov serves as the gateway for information on missions, research, programs and services offered by NASA. The educational section of NASA.gov provides educators with access to curriculum support materials and resources produced through collaborations with NASA mission experts.

This site is sponsored by the Library of Congress. The sites focus is the Declaration of Independence and how to use use it with elementary age students. It gives an example lesson plan with it's focus on identifying, examining and evaluating.

This site has over 600 primary source documents from the time of Christopher Columbus to the Civil War. This would connect with 5th grade curriculum about the American Revolution and Native Americans. This would be a great resource to introduce to teachers and students.

This is an amazing site with hundreds of annotated American political documents.  There are items written by Christopher Columbus, Cotton Mather, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and William Bradford.  This site would be very useful to a classroom teacher to show the actual documents that are discussed in a textbook.